I couldn't get the example from sasa to work as I am dealing ideally with only one variable in each row that is effected

the temp idea works great when i run it at the command line however there is something in my php that is making mysql show very strange results

if i comment out the mysql query that updates the tables everything comes off clean and nothing is changed. Just as it should be.

however when I uncomment the update table queries and give the signal for the script to be run all this happens:

1) the browser hangs up.2) when I go back to the command line and do a select * from classes; the class column, with pos1 and pos2 are unstable. I run the select all command say five times in a row, without doing anything else and the values are different on just about every select * execution.

is this because of some lag effect. am I some how asking mysql to change these values a number of times each?

I beleive this is the case. after I typed this far I went back and ran select * twice and the valuse were stable.